Heath Brownsworth

Vinnie Mirchandani is a technology analyst known for not being shy about expressing his thoughts on a matter, particularly those that involve technology and innovation, or calling it as he sees or hears it. I completely respect Vinnie’s frankness and transparency and it is the primary reason I follow his blog.  It is also why his recent blog post, The Conflicted Cloud, certainly does not surprise me.  In this post, Vinnie presents several provocative dialogues with two executives at legacy technology companies.  The comments from these executives can be interpreted in no other way than legacy technology companies do not care about the cloud and only pay it lip service to appease industry analysts.  As someone who works for a ‘legacy’ technology company, my ‘official’ response is that their comments and opinions are not reflective of all legacy technology companies.

Unofficially I would add ‘you can’t turn an oil tanker on a dime’.  I do not think it is so much that legacy technology companies do not care about the cloud as it is they simply have existing customer bases to consider.  Many of these customers have made considerable investments in previous generations of technology and consideration for these customers and their investments impacts, as it should, the planning of future product and go-to-market strategies.  The net result is that for legacy companies the move the to cloud is simply going to to take longer than it will for start-ups and young companies.  I would however, encourage you to use Vinnie’s litmus test for any company pitching you a cloud ‘story’. Ask them these two straight forward questions:

a) What has been your cloud capex in the last 3 years? 

b) What has been your revenue share of direct to end-customer cloud sales in the last 3 years?

The answers should clearly separte those companies that are serious about the cloud and those that are not.

Heath-